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Age of Absolutism
The era of the '''Age of Absolutism' lasted from about 1702 AD until 1756 AD. It began on the eve of the War of Spanish Succession, the second of a series of major upheavals in the European balance of power. It then ended eve of the Industrial Revolution and the Seven Years’ War, two major turning points of history. The Spanish War of Succession was very different from all previous European conflicts. It was truly a world war, the first of the modern era, about the fate of the Spanish empire as well as about French power. With the emergence of France under Louis XIV as the dominant political and cultural power in Europe, the European balance of power came into full effect. When king Charles II of Spain died without a heir, and the Spanish throne was left to a grandson of Louis XIV, the result was the Spanish War of Succession pitting France against a grand alliance of most of Europe. When the dust settled, a settlement was reached that ultimately left no one completely satisfied but kept the balance of power in place. The war characterised many of the conflicts throughout the 18th-century, constantly shifting alliances to prevent the hegemony of one nation or alliance. Another change in the balance of power was the gradual emergence of Prussia as a great power under Frederick the Great. His reign would be a blueprint for the ideas of an Enlightened Absolute Monarchy; a moderniser, a reformer, and militarily aggressive. Frederick would demonstrate his military genius and the prowess of the Prussian army in the War of Austrian Successions. History Absolutism In the 18th century, Europe was to be studded with miniature reproductions of the French court at Versailles, and the model of monarchy Louis XIV presented; he was the perfect Absolute Monarch. Besides the obvious exceptions – Britain, the Dutch Republic, the cantons of Switzerland and the decaying republics of Italy - the dominant form of government in Europe for most of the 18th-century was monarchy, and an increasingly absolute monarchy. The general trend throughout the Early Modern Period had been that monarchs raised themselves further above the level of the greatest nobles, and buttressed their new pretensions with standing armies, cannons and taxation. Nearly everywhere there was acceptance that, provided the authority of the state was in the right hands, there should be no restriction upon its power. No sphere of life was now regarded as totally inaccessible to the law, the articulate will of the sovereign. This was an enormous break with the thinking of the past. To a medieval man the idea that there might not be fundamental rights and freedoms which would always be respected, or laws of God which could never be contravened by those of men, would have been social and theological blasphemy. One indicator of this was the widespread decline of the representative institutions, which had appeared in most states in the later Middle Ages; the French parliament (Estate General) met once between 1614 and 1789, and this is just the most obvious example. The term "absolute monarch" is acceptable provided we do not exaggerate a monarch’s chances of actually getting his wishes carried out, for many practical checks on his power always existed. Noblemen had long to be treated with care if they were not to be fatally antagonized. Taxation, too, because of the danger of rebellion, could not be pressed too far. It was a problem few could solve. Even Louis XIV often had to back down when faced with strong opposition. The fundamental weakness of absolute monarchy as a political system (quite apart from broader considerations of the subject's liberty) is that it depends entirely on the talents of the monarch in whose hands all authority is gathered. The French Revolution represented the most significant and dramatic challenge to political Absolutism up to that point in history, and gradually democratic ideals spread throughout Europe and ultimately the world. War of Spanish Succession From the 1690s, all of Europe was obsessed with the death, thought imminent, of king [[Thirty Years' War#Habsburg Spain in Decline|'Charles II Habsburg of Spain']] (1665-1700). The Spanish monarchy had created a problem for their royal line by intermarrying within the House of Habsburg. Charles II, the only surviving son of Philip IV, suffered severe mental and physical infirmity, and was in all likelihood sterile. With no heir, the question of the day was who would inherit the vast Spanish domains, including Spanish Belgium, possessions in Italy, the Americas, and the Philippines. Two of the most powerful monarchs in Europe could make almost identical claims for their children; Louis XIV Bourbon of France and Leopold I Habsburg of Austria. Both men had a Spanish Habsburg princess as a mother and a Spanish Habsburg princess as a wife. Despite being at loggerheads in the recent Franco-Dutch War and War of the Grand Alliance, Louis XIV and William III of Britain joined forces to try and resolve the issue by diplomacy; both were anxious to avoid another costly war, but determined to prevent the reassembling of the great Habsburg domain held by Charles V Habsburg in the 16th century. They signed a partition treaty whereby a compromise candidate, 6-year-old Joseph Ferdinand of Bavaria, would inherit the Spanish crown, with Spain's possessions in Italy shared between the Austrian Habsburgs and French Bourbons as a compensation. Alas the boy died in 1699. Undaunted, Louis and William came up with a second partition treaty, the Treaty of London (1700), whereby Leopold's younger son was to have almost all the Spanish domains except those in Italy, seemingly a rather generous offer but without the linchpin of Milan the two Habsburg dominions would find it difficult to function together. Shortly before his death in 1700, Charles II finally made his choice, and changed his will to leave the throne to the Bourbon claimant; Philip, the younger grandson of Louis XIV. Perhaps he was convinced only France had the power to keep the Spanish possessions intact, or perhaps it was simply a fit of pique at the high handed wrangling over his heir. Historians have long debated about whether the War of Spanish Succession (1702-14) was now inevitable. It is difficult to see how Louis XIV could have done anything but accept the late king's bequest to his grandson, Philip V Bourbon of Spain (1724-46). The alternative meant handing the Spanish throne to Habsburg Austria, whose domains would surround France on all sides. Leopold of Austria had rejected the Treaty of London, and there was little change the British and Dutch would fight to enforce the partition. Perhaps if Louis had acted more diplomatically, the conflict might have be contained to France and Austria. But a series of provocations - moving French troops into the Spanish Belgium alarming the Dutch, and granting French merchants trading advantages in the Spanish Americas antagonized both Dutch and British interests - turned a delicate situation into one in which France was again faced by a hostile alliance of major powers. The Grand Alliance was rapidly re-mobilised, eventually including Austria, Britain, the Dutch Netherlands, Prussia, Portugal, and Savoy (centred on Turin north-western Italy). France and Spain could meanwhile only count on Bavaria as a reliable ally. Although the detailed development of the war is very complicated, the basic aim of each side was clear; to trying to control of certain territories that made up Spain's European empire. The Grand Alliance was blessed with the two most brilliant generals of the war; Prince Eugene of Savoy and the English Duke of Marlborough. Each made early inroads. Prince Eugene rapidly seized much of Spanish northern Italy, while Marlborough swept the French from the Spanish Belgium. But a bold French initiative in 1704 threatened to make these peripheral successes of trifling importance. A joint French and Bavarian army pressed eastwards to threaten Vienna itself, hoping to take Austria out of the war, which was struggling to suppress a Hungarian war of independence. However, a rapid 250-mile march by Marlborough from the Low Countries brought him to the Danube in time to join Prince Eugene. The resulting Battle of Blenheim (August 1704) was the outstanding victory of the war for the Grand Alliance; instead of Austria, Bavaria was knocked out of the war. In that year, the Grand Alliance had considerable success at sea too. Gibraltar was taken by a British and Dutch expedition, and an English fleet defeated the French at the Battle of Málaga (August 1704), the largest navel engagement of the war. These two events gave the allies command of the Mediterranean for the rest of the war. Allied efforts to exploit their victories in 1705 foundered on poor co-ordination. The stalemate was broken in 1706 with the Grand Alliance achieving spectacular successes. Prince Eugene's brilliant campaign that summer in north Italy was so convincing that Louis XIV withdrew all his troops from that theatre of the war. At the same time, an Allied force under Marlborough shattered the French at the Battle of Ramillies (May 1706), and Louis was swept from the Low Countries too. The setbacks of 1706 prompted Louis XIV, old now and perhaps weary, to discuss a possible peace. His very reasonable offer of returning to the Treaty of London (1700) was rejected; the allies were now determined that the Bourbons should benefit from no part of the Spanish inheritance. The war continued, and because of the close links between war and trade, extended beyond Europe, particularly to North America, where it is known as Queen Anne's War (1702-13), and perhaps more noteworthy for justifying massacres of native American Indians. It also spread to the West Indies, India and Asia, where it particularly strained Dutch naval resources. The situation in Europe stabilised for the French, when Marlborough and Eugene launched an invasion, advancing on Paris, and defeating the French at the Battle of Malplaquet (September 1709), the bloodiest battle of the war. Despite winning, the allies lost over 20,000 men, twice as many as their opponents. Unable to proceed with the invasion, the defeat ended Austrian and Dutch hopes of a breakthrough in Northern France. A subsequent allied invasion of Spain in 1710 also failed to make any progress, because the population remained fiercely loyal to Philip V. The Grand Alliance, in the meantime, was cracking. In 1710 in Britain, the Whigs suffered an election defeat to the Tories who were inclined towards peace. Moreover, the friendship between Queen Anne and Marlborough's wife came to an end, and with it much of his political clout. Then in 1711, the eldest son of Leopold of Austria unexpectedly died, bringing his brother Charles VI Habsburg (1711-40) to the imperial throne. This undermined the cause of the Grand Alliance; their aim had been to place Charles on the throne of Spain, but nobody wanted him to inherit it as well as being Austrian emperor. The War of Spanish Succession was brought to a close with two separate peace treaties; the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) and Rastatt (1714). The House of Bourbon could be said to have gained the greatest advantage in the war. Philip V Bourbon was recognised as king of Spain and its overseas empire, but renounced his place in the French line of succession, for himself and his descendants. This precluded the union of the French and Spanish crowns, though they remained close allies. But other nations made significant gains too, particularly the British. They won strategic bases in the Mediterranean at Gibraltar and Minorca, and territories in North America disputed with the French in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and the Hudson Bay, as well as commercial privileges in the Spanish Americas. Louis XIV also recognised the Protestant succession, and promised to give no further support to the exiled Jacobites; the same pledge had been made before the war, but broken during the conflict. The Austrian Habsburgs were granted Spanish Belgium as compensation, and to provided a buffer for the Dutch against further French aggression. The Habsburgs also profited in Italy, though the dust took longer to settle there. A still disunited Italy underwent another thirty-odd years of uncertainty, as minor representatives of European royal houses shuffling around it attempting to tie up the loose; Spain for instance reclaimed Sicily and Naples in 1734. Longer term, the settlement represented a major adjustment to the European balance of power, that held good until the French Revolution 75-years later. For the first time the treaty of 1714 declared the aim of the signatories to be the security of peace through a balance of power. So practical an aim was an important innovation in political thinking. There were good grounds for such realism; the war left the participants with unprecedented levels of debt. Wars were more expensive than ever, with the average size of armies having almost trebled in the 60 years since 1648; a level unsustainable for pre-industrial economies. All the great powers saw peace and trade as in their national interest, and Europe enjoyed 25-years of relative peace until the War of Austrian Succession. It also marked the rise of Britain as the leading European maritime and commercial power, at the expense of both France and Spain; she recovered financially from the war in years, while France took decades. Another state on the rise was Prussia, which would henceforth be the great rival of the Austrian Habsburg for supremacy within imperial Germany. In contrast, the Dutch Republic ended the war effectively bankrupt, permanently affecting their commercial and political strength. Finally Spain, the cause of the conflict, became a second-rate power after being stripped of its territories in Italy and Belgium. Rise of Prussia Prussia, which ultimately became the greatest rival of Habsburg Austria within imperial Germany, began its history outside Germany altogether. Old Prussia (today the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad) on the south-eastern Baltic coast, was originally peopled by Slavs, related to the Latvians and Lithuanians. They were conquered and forcibly Christianised in the 13th-century by the Teutonic Knights, diverted from the Holy Land. German peasants were brought in to farm the land, and by around 1350 the majority of the population was German. Meanwhile the area to the west, including the valuable port of Gdansk, was of fully integrated part of the kingdom of Poland. Beyond that, German marcher-lords had conquered the area as Brandenburg, a German state centered on Berlin. In 1525, Old Prussia became a hereditary duchy, held in fief from the Polish crown. In 1618 Brandenburg and Old Prussia were unified under the House of Hohenzollern as Brandenburg-Prussia. This ethnic division, with a Polish region between two German ones, is one of the more disastrous accidents of history; inevitably political pressure would build up to bridge this territorial gap. Prussia long march to power in Europe began under the formidable Frederick William I Hohenzollern (1640-88), popularly known as "the Great Elector". He endowed the state with its defining militaristic and autocratic character. In the wake of the devastating Thirty Years' War, he rebuilt his war-ravaged territories, naturally putting great emphasis on national defence. He raised an army 40,000 strong, roughly 2% of the population, that would later become the model for the Prussian Army. This was achieved through mass mobilisation, in which every young peasant was liable for military service. Once drafted, they received basic training, and then served two month every year until the age of 39. He did recognise the importance of trade, and the mercantile classes were exempted from service. Following Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes, he actively encouraged skilled French Huguenots to emigrate to Prussia, bolstering the country's commercial, technical and industrial base. The nobility were nominally except from military service, but state ideology constantly emphasised that to serve in the officer corp was a moral obligation. His autocratic temperament and his fanatical addiction to work found expression in complete absolutism; the nobles agreed to dissolve the Prussian parliament, and in return were exempt from most taxes. The Prussian nobility (the Junkers) thus cemented their political power at the expense of the peasantry. Upon his ascension, Frederick William had paid homage to the Polish king for the duchy of Old Prussia, but in 1657, through a well-judged blend of warfare and diplomacy, he severed the feudal link between his duchy and Poland. These achievements enabled his son, Frederick III Hohenzollern (1688-1713), to achieve the next crucial step. In 1700 the Habsburg emperor, Leopold I, needed Frederick's support in the War of Spanish Succession. The price was the upgrade of Brandenburg-Prussia from a duchy to a kingdom. There were no German kings within the Holy Roman Empire, apart from the Habsburg emperors' own kingdom of Bohemia. There thus couldn't be a king of Brandenburg, but, using the legal nicety that Prussia was outside the empire, Frederick was allowed to call himself the "king in Prussia"; it was not until 1772 that the title was changed to "king of Prussia". His son Frederick William I Hohenzollern (1713–40), the austere "Soldier King", is credited with creating the vaunted Prussian bureaucracy, hard-working, tightly-controlled, and lean, that allowed the state to maintain an army now 80,000 strong with healthy government finances. The French philosopher Voltaire later said, "Where some states have an army, the Prussian Army has a state!" He developed this army into one of the most professional in Europe, although his troops only briefly saw action during the Great Northern War. He was succeeded by his son, Frederick II Hohenzollern (1740-86), better known as Frederick the Great, who inherited a thriving economy, a large cash surplus, and a well-trained army under a highly-disciplined officer corp, that would soon be the envy of Europe. 28-year-old Frederick was a remarkably cultured young man; an accomplished amateur musician, composer of poems and concertos, and author of political essays, including the Antimachiavell (1740), which put forward a blueprint for a ruler based on Enlightened principles instead of the ruthless self-interest admired by Machiavelli. He conducted regular correspondence with Voltaire, who later eagerly accepted Frederick's invitation to live at the Charlottenburg Palace, after his fall from favour in France. His father, whose interests were limited to administration and the army, was alarmed by his son's artistic tendencies, and did his best to force the boy into a life of military discipline. At the age-of-18, Frederick plotted with a close friend to escape his father for a visit to England. The scheme was discovered, and the pair were arrested and court martialed as deserters; Frederick was imprisoned but later pardoned, while he was forced to watch his friend's execution. Rather than being destroyed by this appalling experience, Frederick emerged in adulthood as a formidable personality. In his early years on the throne, Frederick established a court orchestra with a son of Johann Sebastian Bach among its players, and provided Berlin with an opera house. But he also launched something which his father would have very much admired; the Silesian Wars (1740-45). In October 1740, the Austrian emperor Charles VI Habsburg died without a male heir, leaving as his successor a daughter, Maria Theresa, and sparking the War of Austrian Succession. Less than two months after Maria Theresa's ascension, Frederick astonished Europe by marching a Prussian army into Silesia, a prosperous and strategically important Austrian possession to which the Hohenzollern had a weak claim. The Austrian army arrived in the area in February, and engaged the Prussian forces at the Battle of Mollwitz (April 1741). While both sides made blunders, hampered by heavy snow, Frederick still manage to attain victory, and gained valuable battlefield experience. His victory persuaded the French and Bavarians to join in against Maria Theresa, but Frederick fought battles only for the defence of Silesia. A decisive victory at the Battle of Hohenfriedberg (June 1745) removed any immediate prospect of Austria recovering Silesia. It is one of Frederick's most admired victories, later studied as a model for aggressiveness: a perilous river crossing by night to attack first, granting large amounts of autonomy to officers, the discipline of the Prussian shallow but broad formation, and a dragoon charge in the centre were things unheard of in this period. Frederick's subsequent stunning victories at Soor and Kesselsdorf compelled the Austrians to sue for peace. Under the terms of the Treaty of Dresden (December 1745), Frederick acknowledged Maria Theresa's husband as emperor and received Silesia in exchange. Silesia was a valuable acquisition, more economically developed than any other major part of Prussia, and adding nearly 50% to its population. The wars of Frederick the Great were just starting: in 1756, during the Seven Years War, Austria tried to regain control of Silesia; in 1778 and 1784, thwarted Austrian attempts to exchange Austrian Belgium for Bavaria; and toward the end of his reign, he connected most of his realm by acquiring Polish territories in the First Partition of Poland. Maria Theresa remained Frederick’s most unforgiving opponent, calling him "the evil man in Sanssouci", and her intense personal dislike for him was fully reciprocated, laying the foundation of the long and bitter Austro-Prussian contest for leadership in Germany, which was only to be settled in 1866. Frederick earned his moniker "the Great" for his diplomatic stratagems and wars, but was also known as the pre-eminant example of an Enlightened Absolute Monarchy. Frederick was a tireless and conscientious rule who aspired to be a Philosopher king and viewed kingship as a duty; while medieval monarch had done the same in terms of religious obligation, he justified his autocratic power in terms of pursuing Enlightenment ideas. It was his obligations to protect his subjects from foreign attack, to make them prosperous, and to give them honest administration. With the help of French experts, Frederick gave his state a modern bureaucracy, making it possible for men not of noble birth to become senior civil servants, and improved the taxation system by moving from direct to indirect taxes, which provided the state with more revenue. He reformed the legal system, abolishing most uses of judicial torture, and banning the death penalty without a warrant signed by the king himself. He also began the process of legal codification that culminated, after his death, in the Prussian Common Law (1794), one of the most important 18th-century efforts of this kind. He presided over the construction of canals to promote internal trade, create new farmland through draining the Oderbruch marsh-land, stabilised the currency, and introduced new crops to the country, especially the potato and the turnip. Government reserves of grain were built up, so that the price of bread could be kept down in years of famine. One of the things that helped to mark Frederick in the eyes of contemporaries as a Enlightened ruler, was his pursuit of tolerance for all religions in his realm. Catholics and Jews were not chosen for high office, but he was certainly more tolerant than most neighboring German states. This was largely pragmatic: to integrate formerly Catholic Silesia into Prussia; to promote trade with Poland where a lot of the merchants were Jews; and to attract a diversity of skills to his realm, whether from Jesuit teachers, Huguenot merchants, or Jewish bankers. Frederick also supported the arts and science. He granted a basic form of freedom of speech and the press, and improved the standards of education. He was one of the first rulers to attempt to introduce universal primary education; Prussia's education system was regarded as one the best in Europe. As well as an opera house, Berlin was provided with a royal library, and a rejuvenated Academy of Sciences. Berlin became a major European cultural centre. However, the king preferred to spend his time in the summer residence at Potsdam, where he built the palace of Sanssouci, one of the most important works of Rococo architecture. Frederick died childless, and was succeeded by his nephew, Frederick William II; most modern historians agree that Frederick was homosexual. Frederick the Great remains a somewhat controversial figure in Germany. Nearly all 19th-century German historians were unstinting in their praise for him, and the Nazis glorified Frederick as a precursor to Adolf Hitler. Other historians were quick to label Frederick as the father of "Prussian and German militarism", though it must be said that an aggressive foreign policy was true of every European powers in the 18th and 19th century. By the 21st-century a re-evaluation of his legacy as a great general and enlightened monarch returned opinion of him to favour. War of Austrian Succession in Germany The setback of the War of Spanish Succession and competition with Prussia were a decisive stimuli to reform in the Austrian Habsburg dominions. Centralisation and greater administrative uniformity were essential if this variegated empire was to exercise its due weight in European affairs. There were great obstacles in the way. The dynasty’s empire was very diverse, in nationality, language, institutions; the emperor was Archduke of Austria, King of Bohemia (modern-day Slovakia and Checkia), King of Hungary, Duke of Milan, Duke of Belgium, to name only a few of his many titles. Finally, the Habsburgs provided almost without interruption during these centuries the Holy Roman Emperor, with special responsibilities in Germany. Another problem was that the Habsburg empire was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. The power of the Church was deeply entrenched; it owned huge properties, and had a monopoly of education. Everywhere practical reform seemed to conflict with the social power or the Church. At least the eastern frontier was now finally secured. The Ottoman Turks besieged Vienna for the second and last time in 1683, and, even though the city was only lightly defended by 10,000 men, it was to no avail. Overconfidence was their downfall; failing to Kahlenberg, the besiegers were surprised by a swift attack from this famous hill, and then pursued and defeated at the Battle of Gran (). With the help of the Polish army, Habsburg forces went on to liberated Budapest in 1686, and 11 years later an imperial army under Prince Eugene of Savoy wiped out the last Turkish army in Hungary at the Battle of Zenta (). All of Hungary was ceded to the Austrians by the Treaty of Carlowitz (1699), after a century-and-a-half of Ottoman rule. But the waning of Ottoman power, brought new problems, particularly growing called for a free and independent Hungary. The 1703-11 war of independence failed, but its leader, Transylvanian prince Ferenc Rákóczi II, was just the first leader to unite Hungarians against the Habsburgs. The great issue dominating Austria in the years wake of the War of the Spanish Succession was again a problem of succession; the extinction of the Spanish Habsburgs and the death of his brother Joseph, left Charles VI Habsburg (1711-40) as the only male Habsburg, and he had only two surviving daughters. No woman had ever been Holy Roman Emperor, and succession in some of the Habsburg hereditary lands was assured only to the male line. Charles issued the Pragmatic Sanction (1713) nominating his daughters as heir, and spent his entire reign securing it. Every state of any significance accepted the Sanction, often exacting concessions, such as a British insistence on abolishing an Austrian colonial company. But it was all to little avail. When Charles VI died and was succeeded by his eldest daughter, Maria Theresa (1740–80), Austria was perceived as weak, leading to the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748). Dynamic and ambitious young Frederick the Great of Prussia was just the first to take advantage, seizing Silesia, Austria's most economically developed region. From the summer of 1741, Maria Theresa had the French and Bavarian to cope with, as well as the Prussians. Bavaria, whose ruler was married to her younger sister, challenged her title as Holy Roman Emperor, and claimed a share of the Habsburg inheritance. It suited the French to support Bavaria, always eager to diminish Habsburg power, which encouraged Saxony to follow suit, and Spain to try to oust the Habsburgs from Milan. By November, French and Bavarian armies had push through upper Austria into Bohemia, and entered Prague. Maria Theresa had to flee Vienna, and was advised on all sides to come to terms. In defiance of the grave situation, she managed to secure the vital support of the Hungarians for the war effort, as well as the British, out of hostility toward France rather than any loyalty to the Pragmatic Sanction. Contrary to all expectations, the young empress drove the French and Bavarian forces back so successfully that by January 1742 the Austrians were in the Bavarian capital of Munich; though Prague was not recovered till December. By 1744, the focus of hostilities had shifted away from central Europe, to a direct conflict between Britain and France. In 1745, Britain, eager that Austrian armies should concentrate on France, persuaded Maria Theresa to come to terms with her real enemy, Frederick the Great. The war dragged on for another three years, with fighting in northern Italy, Austrian Belgium, and at sea where the British did serious damage to French trade. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) made a few minor adjustments between Austria and Spain in the patchwork of Italy, but otherwise, with one exception, restored to their previous owners the territories occupied during the war; Austria returned Bavaria and French returned Austrian Belgium. Maria Theresa's husband was also recognised as Holy Roman Emperor. The exception was Silesia, whose sudden seizure by Frederick the Great in 1740 had provoked the war. For Maria Theresa, the war had secured her own Habsburg inheritance, but the loss of Silesia rankled and provided one of the major roots of the Seven Yeas War (1756-73). Maria Theresa was herself deeply conservative and by no means sympathetic to Enlightenment ideas, but, after the 1740s, it became clear that the Habsburg monarchy was in a struggle for supremacy with Prussia. She promulgated significant reform to strengthen Austria. With the assistance of Friedrich Wilhelm von Haugwitz, she reorganised Austria's ramshackle military, creating a modern standing army of 108,000 men. When Haugwitz was then appointed head of the bureaucracy, he initiated a radical centralization of state institutions. She also promoted commerce, strengthening Austria's industry and agriculture through government intervention, and erecting trade barriers to encourage Silesia's textile industry to move to Bohemia. Between 1754 and '64, Maria Theresa doubled the state revenue, though her attempts to tax the Church and nobility was only partially successful. Although her education reforms had merit - establishing secular primary schools, a curriculum that emphasised reason over rote-learning, and universal education until the age of 12 - they met with resistance particularly from peasants who wanted the children in the fields instead; in many parts of Austria, half of the population was illiterate well into the 19th-century. Historians have generally considered Maria Theresa's 40-year reign to be very successful when compared to other Habsburg rulers, though she's rarely included among the Enlightened monarchs, due to her support for censorship and judicial torture, and especially her religious intolerance. Once the road to reform had been entered upon, it was bound in the end to lead to conflict with the Church and various provincial nobilities. This came to a climax during the reign of Maria Theresa’s son and successor, Joseph II Habsburg (1780-90), who introduced even more sweeping reforms; abolishing serfdom, improving legal procedures, decreeing religious toleration, and attempting to control the Church. However, Joseph had antagonized the nobles of Brabant, Hungary and Bohemia to the point of open defiance, and powerful local institutions virtually paralysed the government by the end of his reign. European Colonial Conflict From the late-17th-century onwards, commerce and overseas matters loomed larger and larger in European foreign policy. By the time the term "mercantilism" was coined in 1776 by the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, European states had been trying to put mercantile theory into practice for two centuries. It was widely accepted that there was only so much trade and profit to go around, and in such a zero-sum system, the only way for one kingdom to win would be at the expense of others. There were many applications of mercantile theory: high tariffs on competitors goods, especially on manufactured goods; forbidding overseas colonies to trade with other nations, since colonies were deemed to exist purely for the benefit of the mother country; and forbidding trade to be carried in foreign ships. It was the Dutch who first made it clear that they were prepared use force of arms to claim and protect such trade and profits. What they would do for it was made clear from the 17th-century in the the Spanish Caribbean and Portuguese Brazil, where they engaged great fleets to seize the world’s chief producers of sugar. The latter provided their only serious failure, for in 1654 the Portuguese were able to evict the Dutch garrisons and resume control of Brazil without subsequent challenge. By the last decades of the 17th-century, the Dutch Golden Age as a great colonial power was clearly beginning to succumb, though not to disappear. The unlikely challenger was the British. The two nations had fought alongside one another for decades against the Spanish during the Dutch War of Independence, but there were three Anglo-Dutch Wars between 1652 and '74. These were essentially trade wars, as commerce and overseas matters loomed larger and larger in European foreign policy. In North America, the accidents of history and facts of geography had combined to form a precarious balance of power between Spanish, French, and British interests. The quest for gold had brought the Spanish to Mexico. Their expansion was northwards to the west of the Rockies, into what are now New Mexico, Arizona and California, though the lands beyond Santa Fe were very thinly inhabited; for the most part occupancy meant a few forts and trading posts and a larger number of missions. Further north, the search for the Northwest Passage had brought the French along the valley of the St Lawrence and the Great Lakes, where they established a vigorous royal province based largely on trade in furs. While exploring through and around the Great Lakes, they began to move south down the Mississippi, Ohio, and Missouri rivers. By 1682, the French had reached the mouth of the great river, claiming the region as Louisiana, in honour of Louis XIV; New Orleans was not founded until 1718. New France was thus a huge area on the map, but outside the St Lawrence valley and Quebec it was only a scatter of strategically and commercially important forts and trading posts; there were barely 15,000 French in North America in all. Meanwhile, the British enjoyed the fertile Atlantic coastal fringe from Florida north to the Kennebec River, neatly confined by the Appalachian Mountains. Dutch New Amsterdam, lying exactly in the middle of this stretch, seemed to the British both an anomaly and an extremely desirable possession. When an English fleet arrived in 1664, the Dutch governor accepted the reality of the situation and surrenders the territory without a shot being fired; New Amsterdam was transformed without upheaval into New York. Continental North American in 1700 was organized as twelve colonies (a thirteenth, Georgia, appeared in 1732) in which lived some 400,000 settles. The middle colonies were the wealthiest, with much fertile soil that allowed the area to become a major exporter of wheat and other grains. Interest in the northern colonies had originally been awoken by the abundance of fishing, furs, and lumber, and, with generally rocky soil, colonists tended to move quickest into commence, shipbuilding, and craft-work. The southern colonies could produce tobacco, rice, and indigo, and from the start these imported the vast major of African slaves. Although British colonies, they soon became somewhat ethnically mixed, for after 1688 German, French Huguenot and Swiss emigrants had begun to arrive in appreciable numbers. Each colony had a slightly different governmental structure, but typically worked through some sort of representative assembly which spoke for its inhabitants to a royal governor appointed in London. Each of these three colonial groups engaged in periodic conflict with each other and with the original occupants of the land, the Native American Indians. But for the first two centuries of colonization these were little more than skirmishes. There seemed to be room for all. This began to change after 1689, when Britain and France were almost continually at war in Europe, starting with the War of the Grand Alliance (1688–97), and continuing with the Spanish War of Succession (1702-15), War of Austrian Succession (1740-48), and Seven Years’ War (1756-63). A more direct cause of conflict in North America derived from overlapping English and French interest in the disputed territory of the Ohio Valley, which eventually sparked the French and Indian War (1754-63) and dramatic change. By contrast, South America would remain relatively tranquil, where Spanish and Portuguese colonies had few regions of overlapping interest, and the French, British, and Dutch settlements of the Guiana plains were economically trivial. The presence from the start of large pre-colonial native populations, as well as the nature of the occupying powers, did much to differentiate its colonialism from that of the north. Centuries of occupation by the Muslim Moors had accustomed the Spanish and Portuguese to the idea of living in a multiracial society; they did not share the concern for the "purity of their blood" which was shown by the English and French. There soon emerged in Latin America a population of mixed blood from interbreeding with both the indigenous peoples and with the growing population of black slaves, who had first been imported to work on the plantations of Brazil and mines of Bolivia in the 16th century. Nonetheless, these societies were stratified along racial lines. The dominant classes were always the Iberian-born and the creoles, persons of European blood born in the colonies; from there led downwards a blurred incline of increasing gradations of blood to the most oppressed, the pure Indians and black slaves. Meanwhile, Catholic missionaries were almost continuously at work converting the natives, and the Church was an important reinforcement for a thinly spread administrative apparatus of South America. One important development was the discovery of gold near Sao Paulo in 1695. This sparked the first gold rush in the history of the Americas, as prospectors swarmed to the region. By the time diamonds were discovered in large quantities in the same region in the 1720s, the centre of gravity in Brazil had decidedly moved to the south; the capital would move from Bahia in the north to Rio de Janeiro in 1763. In most of Latin America, isolated within the Spanish and Portuguese empires, the upheavals of the French Revolution in 1789 had little immediate effect, other than as a talking point of great topical interest. But the French islands in the Caribbean were more directly linked with these distant events. When a slave revolt in Haiti was rapidly successful under the first Latin American revolutionary hero, Toussaint L'Ouverture, no one could have predicted the domino effect that resulted; the Latin American Independence movement from 1809 to 1825. For all the spectacular outflow of bullion from Central and South America, and large-scale inflow of people to North America, it was the Caribbean islands that were of the greatest economic importance to Europe throughout most of the 17th-century. This importance rested on their agricultural produce, above all on sugar. Medieval man had sweetened his food with honey; by 1700 sugar was a European necessity. Tobacco, hardwood, and coffee were the other important products of the islands. The Caribbean was an area where the Spanish, French, Dutch and British colonial frontiers met, and one of the most frequent theatres where the great powers fought out their disputes. The smaller islands frequently changed hands, and Spain lost two large sections of the central Caribbean to her rivals in the late-17th-century; Jamaica to the British in 1655, and the western half of Hispaniola to the French in 1664 (modern-day Haiti). The area was long prey to disorder, and there were great prizes to be won. Not surprisingly, it became the classical and, indeed legendary hunting-ground of pirates, whose final heyday came in 1710s and '20s. In the Far East, although the British would ultimately eclipsed the Dutch as a colonial power, in the short term the Anglo-Dutch Wars left the Netherlands with a stronger position in the Indian Ocean, Indonesia, and South China Sea. When hostilities ceased after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a deal between the two nations left the spice trade to the Dutch, and trade with India to the British East India Company. The rise of British power in India was very gradual. After the establishment of Fort St George at Madras in 1644, the acquisition of Bombay from the Portuguese in 1661 as a part of the dowry of Charles II’s queen, and establishment of Fort William at Calcutta in 1690, there was no further British penetration of India until the mid-18th-century. From these early footholds the British conducted a trade in cotton, silk, indigo dye, coffee, and tea, less glamorous than the Dutch spice trade, but one which grew in value and importance. It also changed their national habits as the establishment of coffee-houses in London showed, as well as a new national beverage that poet William Cowper would soon commemorate, "cups that cheer but not inebriate". These unremarkable beginnings on coastal India offered no clues to what would become a lengthy British presence on the subcontinent. During this time the main rivals of the British in India were not the Dutch or Portuguese, but the French who were similarly expanding in the region, having established themselves at Pondicherry in 1673. Military domination in India was unlikely to prove easy, as a defeat of the East India Company’s forces against the Moghul Empire in Child's War (1686-90) showed. Yet all preconceptions were to be changed by the dramatic collapse of the Moghuls after the death of the 8th emperor, Aurangzeb, in 1707. The consequences emerged slowly, but their total effect was that India dissolved into a collection of autonomous states with no paramount power. In retrospect it seems remarkable that neither Britain nor France took advantage for so long, and then moved only by hostility to one another during the Seven Years’ War (1756-73). African Slave Trade Slavery has occurred in many forms throughout the world since the very first civilisation; slavery features in the earliest Sumerian law codes that refer to it as an established institution. In Western Europe, slavery had mostly died out by the year 1000, replaced by serfdom, which itself began to decline following the Black Death of 1347. But a new and disastrous chapter in the story of slavery began with the arrival of the Age of Discovery in the 15th-century. From late-15th to late-19th century, somewhere between 10 and 12 million Africans were forcibly transported from Africa to the Americas as slaves labour. The Muslim world had been the first to import large numbers of sub-Saharan Africans as slaves into their territories, where they became a particularly despised group, perhaps because of the devastating Zanj Slave Revolt (869-883). The Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that some people were just naturally slaves, saying, "It is clear that there are certain people who are free, and certain people who are slaves by nature, and it is both to their advantage, and just, for them to be slaves." The Muslims first connected this Classic Greek idea with the sub-Saharan skin colour, and these racist attitudes, imagining blacks as inherently lesser, were imported into Europe via the Iberian Peninsula. From at least 1444, Portuguese ships were transporting Africans into Europe, when one of Henry the Navigator's expeditions returns with slaves exchanged for Moorish prisoners. By the 1480s, the Portuguese were in direct contact with north-western Africa, which had long been the source of slaves for the Muslim north. They imported slaves for use on the sugar plantations of the Cape Verde and Madeira Islands, and this African trade expanded greatly with the development of labour-intensive plantations growing sugar, cotton and tobacco in the Caribbean and Americas; the first African slaves arrived in Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in 1501. Portuguese merchants dominated the transatlantic slave trade until the mid-17th-century, but other nations with transatlantic interests soon become the main visitors to the African coast. By the 18th-century, the majority of the ships carrying out this trade were British, but it was a monstrous tragedy in which the whole of Europe participated. The owners of slave ships wasted no part of their journey, evolving the procedure known as the Triangular Trade. Ships departed Europe with items in demand in west Africa; firearms, alcohol, cotton goods, and metal tools. The goods were eagerly exchanged for slaves in ports around the Gulf of Guinea. Europeans did not generally capture the slaves themselves; instead Africans were captured by other Africans during tribal wars, and then marched to the coast to sell to European buyers. The Atlantic passage was notorious for the overcrowded and unsanitary conditions on slave ships, in which up to 400 Africans were packed tightly into tiers below decks. They were typically chained together, the heat was unbearable, oxygen levels became so low that candles would not burn, and they were allowed to go on the upper decks for only a few hours each day. On average each slave had four square feet of space; as one eye-witness testified before the British parliament in 1791, “''They had not so much room as a man in his coffin.” It is estimated that one-in-six died before reaching the Caribbean, where the main slave markets on the American side of the ocean were located. Those who did not die were bought and sold like any economic commodity; the term "''chattel-slave" derived from the same Latin word as cattle. Where Africans went changed over time, but roughly 48% of the total went to the Caribbean, 41% of slaves to Brazil, and just 5% to what would become the United States. After purchase, slave owners typically branded their new possession on the cheeks, and set them to all types of work. Some did housework and skilled craft-work, but the vast majority worked as agricultural labourers. The harvesting and processing of sugar was perhaps the worst of these jobs, because speed was incredibly important; once cut, sugar sap can go sour within a day. This meant that slaves would often worked 48 hours straight during harvest time, both in the fields and in the sweltering press houses where the cane was crushed in hand rollers and then boiled. Slaves caught their hands in the rollers so regularly that their overseers usually kept a hatchet on hand for amputations. Conditions in Brazil were particularly brutal, and the need to import slaves continued until slavery ended in the 1880s. Things were slightly better in the Caribbean and the United States, so that slave populations began increasing naturally, meaning that more slaves were born than died. This of course means that slave-owners would sell the children of slaves, or use them to work their own fields. It is notable that the African slave trade for a long time awoke no misgivings. The lengths to which Christians went to justify this traffic still retain a certain gruesome fascination. The Bible was widely used, especially an ambiguous episode in Genesis where Noah curses his son Ham, saying, "the lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers”. The story's original purpose was probably to justify the subjection of the Canaanite people to the Israelites, but it has been used through the centuries as an explanation for many different forms of slavery and serfdom; that some people are slaves as part of God's plan. To this narrative was added a racialised version of the curse of Ham, that his descendants had been "blackened" by their sins. It was commonly accepted during the 18th and 19th century, despite the fact that race or skin colour is never mentioned in the Bible. The other prominent notion of "white man's burden" which proposes that the white race is morally obligated to civilise Africans is a later 19th-century concept from the Scramble for Africa. Missionary efforts to convert Africans to Christianity were notably absent during the period of the slave trade. This suited ideological and economical interests of the European elite, since Christianity would take slaves from the fields, and because once converted the Church tended to throw its protection from mistreatment around them, as it often did with Christian Native Americans. Even Enlightenment thinkers, who argued that liberty was a natural human right, had little to say about African slavery. It was not until the late-18th-century that the abolitionist movement began to gather momentum. The Caribbean and the last Golden Age of Piracy Piracy, or thievery on the high seas, has popped up in many forms throughout history, from the Viking raiders of the 10th and 11th century, to the Barbary pirates of Muslim North Africa in the 16th century, and remains an issue today, particularly in the waters off the Somali coast. The Caribbean became the classical and, indeed legendary hunting-ground of pirates during the so-called Golden Age of Piracy, which lasted from roughly 1655 to 1726. This era produced many of the most infamous pirates of all time; Edward "Blackbeard" Teach, Henry Every, Henry Morgan, William "Captain" Kidd; Henry Jennings, Bartholomew "Black Bart" Roberts, Edward Low, Benjamin Hornigold, Charles Vane, "Calico Jack" Rackham, Anne Bonny, and Mary Read. Conditions were just right for piracy to boom. Firstly, there were ships full of valuable cargo, at a time of growing wealth and trade for all the nations who controlled territory in the Americas. Secondly, the Caribbean was an area where the Spanish, French, Dutch and British colonial frontiers met, and due to a high degree of tension among the colonial powers, most were more concerned with engaging each other than pirates; the region was long prey to disorder and little or no law. And finally, there were thousands of experienced sailors, many of whom had been "press ganged" into service in European navies, where the wages well low and unreliable, and conditions abominable. Comparatively, life on a pirate ship was a better and freer existence; pirates were extremely diligent about sharing the loot fairly, and, though punishments could be severe, they were rarely needless. Pirate crews came from every maritime country of Europe, and a good number of sailors were Africans. Privateers, licensed by a government to attack enemy towns or shipping during times of war, had flourished in the Caribbean since at least the 1520s, pioneered by French buccaneer like Pierre Le Grand. After the British captured Jamaica from Spain in 1655, they freely granted privateering commissions to the pirates who had established themselves on Tortuga, off Haiti. The aftermath of the War of Spanish Succession saw the last large resurgence of piracy. Thousands of able-bodied sailors left unemployed by the end of the war in 1714 turned en masse to piracy as a way to make ends meet. However, this same time period saw a changing attitude towards piracy from the great powers. The war had left the participants with unprecedented levels of debt, and in the aftermath the European great powers all saw peace as in their national interest; Europe enjoyed 25-years of relative peace until the War of Austrian Succession. In 1715, Henry Jennings and his pirate cohorts launched a successful raid on Spaniards trying to recover gold from a sunken treasure galleon off Florida. Contrary to their expectations, the British governor of Jamaica refused to allow them to spend their loot on his island. With Kingston and the declining Tortuga closed to them, this nucleus of mostly British ex-privateers founded a new pirate base at Nassau, on the island of New Providence in the Bahamas, which had been abandoned during the war. Until the arrival of a new governor, Nassau was controlled these pirates and their many recruits. In 1718, European nations decided to put an end to the pirate plague, bolstering their navies in the region, and commissioning pirate hunters, with the British appointing Woodes Rogers, a tough former privateer, as governor of Jamaica. The most effective weapon, however, was royal pardons. Some who took the pardon soon returned to piracy, like Blackbeard or Charles Vane, but most stayed legit. By the late-1720s, piracy continued, but was not nearly as bad a problem. Although some of the details have been romanticized, the effect upon popular culture of the Golden Age of Piracy can hardly be overstated, with such literary works as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1881). European Balance of Power In the 18th century, the major European powers - France, Britain, Prussia, Austria, Russia - undoubtedly existed within the so-called European balance of power; constantly shifting alliances to prevent the hegemony of one nation or alliance. The two leading great European powers, France and Britain, were invariably on opposing sides of such alliances. Yet for a time in the aftermath of the War of the Spanish Succession, they often acted in a somewhat uneasy alliance, both seeing peace as in their national interest, with their national economies in a perilous state. When Louis XIV died in 1715, the French throne was left to his five-year-old great-grandson, Louis XV (1715-74). The French empire, though starting late compared to other Atlantic powers, was now the leading colonial rival to Britain, but after twenty-five years of almost continuous warfare, the nation's finances were now precariously close to bankruptcy. This was the era of financial experimentation in order to repair the national finances. The French regency was persuaded to gamble on a public-private partnership, but the Mississippi Bubble burst in 1720 leaving many people financially ruined and a lasting distrust of national banks; not until 1800 was the Banque de France finally established by Napoleon, long after the same step had been taken in other European countries. The same phenomenon was occurring across the Channel in Britain, where the shares of the South Sea Bubble had an equally irresistible allure to speculative investors; as many fortunes were made on the way up as were lost on the way down. However by the 1740s, with more aggressive factions in power in Britain and France, both embroiled themselves in the War of Austrian Succession. Most of the direct clashes were at sea, and in their overseas territories. The British navy blockaded the harbours of France, and harassed French merchant fleets en route for the West Indies or India. In 1745, the British seize the French Louisbourg in Canada, and in 1746, the French occupied British Madras in India; both were returned in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. Yet the war had only postponed an inevitable colonial conflict between Europe's leading powers less than a decade later; the Seven Years' War. In the struggle to become the dominant naval power in Europe, the British would have distinct advantages. Britain enjoyed a long period of political stability after the Glorious Revolution. The ability of parliament to implement gradual reform, albeit often with great reluctance, would allow Britain to avoid the kind of dramatic revolutions that would rock Europe in the decades to come, beginning with the French Revolution. Britain's political stability brought economic prosperity, so that she could recover in years from wars, while France took decades, and Spain and Holland would be unable to reverse their military and economic decline. Meanwhile although Britain feared one nation or alliance achieving hegemony on continental Europe, she was able to keep herself aloof from direct involvement in continental conflicts, a luxury not available to the French; even in the Napoleonic Wars, Britain's involvement was peripheral. Meanwhile, she focused her attention on using wars as a pretext to wrestle colonial holdings from her rivals. Her allies were less than impressed with her often lacklustre support in continental conflicts, and she would find few allies in her time of need, during the American War of Independence. Category:Historical Periods